MediaTek announces second generation Wi-Fi 7 chips: Filogic 860 and Filogic 360

MediaTek is expanding its portfolio with two Wi-Fi 7 chips: the Filogic 860 and Filogic 360. The new chips will be released in mid-2024 and are intended for routers and clients such as smartphones.

The Taiwanese MediaTek markets the Filogic 860 as a chip for network devices, while the Filogic 360 is intended for use in clients such as smartphones and laptops. The Wi-Fi 7 chips were first shown during CES in 2023. These are less advanced versions of the Filogic 880 and Filogic 380.

The MediaTek Filogic 360 has dual Bluetooth 5.4 with support for Bluetooth LE Audio. The Wi-Fi 7 chip can achieve speeds of up to 2.9Gbit/s. The chip also supports a channel bandwidth of up to 160MHz.

The Filogic 860 is marketed as a more advanced Wi-Fi 7 solution on a 6nm process. The chip can serve as an access point, router or mesh node. The chip must be able to support speeds of up to 7.2 Gbit/s. The triple-core Arm Cortex-A73 processor enables advanced tunneling and security features for business users and service providers.

Wi-Fi 7, also called 802.11be, has a theoretical maximum throughput speed of 46Gbit/s, which is considerably higher than the 9.6Gbit/s of Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E. However, current solutions are far from achieving the theoretical maximum throughput. Furthermore, Wi-Fi 7 supports the 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz bands with channel bandwidths up to 320MHz.